DALLAS — When the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, George Harris got a phone call.
His longtime partner, Jack Evans, asked how fast he could get to the courthouse.
“I don’t want to break the speed limit,” Harris recalled saying.
After 54 years together, the pair -- long known by their friends and community as simply “Jack and George” -- were finally able to make their partnership official in the eyes of the law. They were among the first same-sex couples to be married in Dallas County.
The clerk let them skip the line -- because, Harris recalled, he said they'd waited the longest.
“It was pure bedlam down there -- just hundreds and hundreds of people,” Harris said, looking back on that day nearly a decade later. “I didn’t think the Supreme Court was going to rule in our favor. It was shocking.”
A few floors away, Judge Tonya Parker was having trouble managing her docket. The room just kept getting louder and louder.
"People were coming from everywhere," she said. "It was incredible."
Her fellow judges assembled in her jury box as a show of support. Parker, who is gay herself, had made headlines years prior for declining to perform marriages for anyone until she could do so for everyone.
"This wasn’t for personal reasons; it’s because of what I believe about the law," she said. "Fundamentally, it’s all about equal protection under the law."
Once the highest court in the land decided that everyone could indeed get married, her colleagues decided that she should be the first among them to perform a same-sex ceremony.
Neither Parker nor any of her peers had ever done one before.
“I was so nervous,” she recalled. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Thankfully, her first ceremony went off without a hitch. That day -- June 26, 2015 – remains one of Parker's favorite on the bench.
“The people that I looked at in this room were people who felt that they had finally been validated as full Americans,” she said.
As for Harris, he still proudly displays his marriage certificate on his wall. He said he still thinks about that day often -- and of his husband, who would die just three days before the pair could celebrate their first wedding anniversary.
"He taught me how to love," Harris said. "And I think that that’s the greatest gift you can ever give to anybody."